The invitation to write this commentary asked for reaction to the “sadly
dour view” on integration of Steinhorn and Diggs-Brown. Yet I don’t find
the authors’ view sad or dour; their conclusion that racial integration
is an illusion is honest and hopeful. Like the authors, it seems to me
that the only hope of progress toward racial justice in this country requires
this kind of realistic assessment of the situation we find ourselves in.
Painful as it sometimes was, as I read I could see not only the lives of
my fellow Americans in their book, but my own life as well.

So, I could pick nits on a couple of points (most noticeably, I found
their final suggestion about an advertising campaign against racism to
be strangely off the mark). My most important reaction to the book, however,
is not so much to the authors’ claims as to an underlying reality that
struck me. As I read, I realized that the U.S. middle class, particularly
the white middle class, is probably the single biggest impediment to justice
the world has ever known. While Steinhorn and Diggs-Brown, noting how quickly
they abandoned the dream of integration, do suggest the magnanimity of
middle class is overestimated, I think the point needs to be stated even
more bluntly.

In both domestic and international policy, it is the self-interested
behavior or the inattention to injustice on the part of the middle class
that makes possible the oppressive policies of the United States -- the
attack on labor unions and working people, the coddling of big business
that produces obscene gaps in wealth and privilege, the abandonment of
the poor, and the assault for five decades on any third-world movement
that dared to strike out on an independent course.

While it is a much more elite class that plans, executes and primarily
benefits from those policies, it is a materially affluent, politically
quiescent, and morally lazy middle class that allows the elite strata to
get away with it. In a nominal democracy in which the use of direct coercion
and violence against the middle class is virtually unheard of, the complicity
of the middle class has to be faced honestly.

As Steinhorn and Diggs-Brown point out, that complicity on domestic
race relations is clear: The white middle class has turned its back on
residential and school integration, the linchpins of any true integration
of racial groups. But I would go further, to highlight how racism and complacency
allow other U.S. crimes to go unpunished. As I write this, for example,
the United States continues to demand that the most comprehensive regime
of economic sanctions continue to be imposed on Iraq, while also conducting
a low-level bombing campaign. The predictable result of this starve-and-bomb
strategy is that as many as 1 million Iraqi civilians, at least half of
them children under the age of 5, have died as a direct result of U.S.
policy in the past nine years, according to United Nations studies.

While one can argue about the underlying rationale for the policy, at
the very least decent people should be able to see that making innocent
civilians suffer and die at near-genocidal levels to achieve the policy
is a crime against humanity. Yet when I have confronted my middle-class
cohort on this issue, I most often get a half-hearted shrug and a “that’s
the way the world works” comment. Usually unspoken, but often intimated,
of course, is, “What’s the big deal? They’re just Arabs.”

If anything, Steinhorn and Diggs-Brown may not be dour enough. The shameful
moral and political performance of the middle class does not inspire confidence
in the future for progressive politics. But, perhaps paradoxically, in
the United States it may be that the middle class is our best hope for
a progressive future. As hard as it is to imagine the middle class exhibiting
the political will necessary for that future, it is even harder to imagine
that future without the middle class taking an active role. Let us all
commit to the self-reflection, dialogue, and activism necessary for that
transformation.

Robert Jensen is a professor in the Department of Journalism at the
University of Texas at Austin and member of several peace-and-justice groups.
He also writes on contemporary political issues for a variety of newspapers
and magazines. For copies of his essays on white privilege, contact him
at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.